The tract is one of the most favourable specimens of Swift’s controversial method and trenchant satire.  The style is excellent—­forcible and pithy; while the arguments are like most of Swift’s arguments, aptly to the point with yet a potentiality of application which fits them for the most general statement of the principles under discussion.  Scott considers the pamphlet “as having materially contributed to the loss of the bill for repeal of the Test Act during the Earl of Pembroke’s vice-royalty.”  In the same year Swift wrote “A Letter to a Member of Parliament in Ireland on choosing a new Speaker there.”  This short tract bears also on the question of the Test; but it is not included in this volume, since it was intended as an electioneering pamphlet.

I have been unable to obtain access to a copy of the first edition of the “Letter on the Sacramental Test.”  The text here given is that of the “Miscellanies” of 1711, collated with that given in the “Miscellanies,” 1728, and with those printed by Faulkner, Hawkesworth, and Scott.

[T.S.]

  A letter concerning the
  sacramental test.

ADVERTISEMENT.[1]

[Footnote 1:  This “Advertisement” is taken from “Miscellanies in Prose and Verse,” printed for John Morphew, 1711.  On page 314 of that volume it forms a “foreword” to “A Letter concerning the Sacramental Test.”  It is omitted from the reprint in the “Miscellanies” of 1728.  The page which Swift says he has taken leave to omit cannot be identified.  Probably this was another of Swift’s manoeuvres for concealing the identity of the author.  The “Advertisement” of George Faulkner to his edition of Swift’s Works (vol. iv., 1735) is as follows: 

“In the second volume of Doctor Swift’s and Mr. Pope’s ‘Miscellanies,’ I found the following treatise, which had been printed in London, with some other of the Dean’s works, many years before, but at first came out by itself in the year 1708, as the date shews:  And it was at a juncture when the Dissenters were endeavouring to repeal the Sacramental Test, as by common fame, and some pamphlets published to the same purpose, they seem to be now again attempting, with great hope of success.  I have, therefore, taken the liberty to make an extract out of that discourse, omitting only some passages which relate to certain persons, and are of no consequence to the argument.  But the author’s weight of reasoning seems at present to have more weight than it had in those times, when the discourse first appeared.

“The author, in this letter, personates a Member of Parliament here [Dublin], to a Member of Parliament in England.

“The Speaker mentioned in this letter was Allen Broderick, afterwards Chancellor and Lord Middleton; and the prelate was Dr. Lyndsay, afterwards Lord Primate,” [T.S.]]